Having a random quantum seed to an otherwise opaque internal process is still a far cry from free will and agency.
Consider thermodynamics:
even without quantum weirdness, we can't compute/predict the micro interactions of atoms in a gas. But most average out, and we can make a lot of meaningful predictions on a macro scale.
Back to brains: even if there is some underlying quantum process that might free us from full determinism, on a macro level, it might not matter - you're still gonna value what you value, and make the same "choices".
And if in some cases a "decision" is actually impacted by some quantum effect... is it "agency"? Or just yet another external process affecting us?
Terry Bouricius (Vermont politician) has a draft book on this topic (link below). He used to be a strong advocate for electoral reform, but after seeing Citizen Assemblies in action, now advocates for Sortition.
He has some interesting ideas about how to structure a modern government with sortition - it wouldn't just be replacing the House and Senate with randomly selected representatives, but, instead: having more smaller bodies with more limited scope (ex. a body for defining the rules of bodies), and spinning out a new group for every major law proposal.
My favorite discovery on this topic (mentioned in the book), were letters between the Founding Fathers of the US where they explicitly discussed not having "democracy" in the United States, because it would give too much power to the people, and so they purposefully chose an election based system because it allowed for elites to retain control by using money to run campaigns (note also: "democracy" at the time referred exclusively to Athenian style democracy).
I don't think you can characterize the federalist papers as letters between the founding fathers. Those were essays by like 2-3 of them, published and pretty widely distributed
We, as in humanity, haven't even figured out how to support the people we already have. We never have. Even without the threat of climate change, billions are under-nourished.
High tech might alleviate some issues, but the root cause could be addressed through existing social technology. For example, say we had AGI robots that could do all the work that humans do today - if owned only by rich capitalists, the quality of life for many may actually drop. But, combined with land value taxes and universal basic income, the result would likely be an increase quality of life (unless it turns out humans are willing to keep increasing population as long as the amount of aggregate suffering is below a certain level). AGI robots don't necessarily make things better. But social tech like LVT+UBI could meaningfully make things better, and, it could do it today (without the need for more "geniuses").
Starting with "problems" is already cutting out half of the kinds of businesses that exist.
I much prefer the "jobs-to-be-done" framing: people and organizations desire certain things done, and they pay for products/services to get them done; some jobs are not being well done (and thus, a "problem"), but many jobs are being done fine, but, there may still be opportunities to do them much better. (aka "pains" and "gains")
Ex. Alice was fine with her extra bedroom but AirBnB allowed her to make an extra 2k per month? etc
Its often easier to find acute pains to address than great gain opportunities, but it is possible, and many startups do it. Ignoring gain-potential as an avenue of value creation is myopic.
Exactly. I think one could argue that "gains" have yielded more successful startups.
e.g. Amazon/DoorDash - driving to the store was "fine", but ship to home = way more convenient
Uber - Waving down taxi is "fine" experience, but on demand transportation = way more convenient
Slack - communicating through email is "fine", but async messaging = more real time and productive
It's typically easier to make money from concentrations of money (rich individuals and companies), and those tend have more gain opportunities than problems (because they've already monied-away their problems).
...and, there's nothing particularly preventing a similar approach in JS (keywords would need to be strings, and... data manipulation in JS is relatively a huge pain compared to Clojure)
Consider thermodynamics: even without quantum weirdness, we can't compute/predict the micro interactions of atoms in a gas. But most average out, and we can make a lot of meaningful predictions on a macro scale.
Back to brains: even if there is some underlying quantum process that might free us from full determinism, on a macro level, it might not matter - you're still gonna value what you value, and make the same "choices".
And if in some cases a "decision" is actually impacted by some quantum effect... is it "agency"? Or just yet another external process affecting us?